I've been running Mint 10 without issue for a while but after installing and using Ubuntu 11.04 for a few months on another machine I've been really pleased with the Gnome 3 experience so I thought I'd see what the Mint guys had brought to the table with Gnome 3....

So I downloaded and ran the live CD today at work and tried it on a random Dell Studio laptop and it was brilliant! All the menus were snappy and responsive and it looks beautiful - all this from the liveCD and on a very average machine. Definitely time to upgrade I thought...

Brought it home tonight and installed and it is running like a DOG. The bottom menu takes about 3-4 seconds to pop up and is ridiculously sluggish once it is open, as is the top bar. Every window takes an age to load. Everything is just so unresponsive even the run menu takes a good few seconds to appear.

Admittedly the machine isn't amzing but should be able to handle it and the Dell machine at work was no more powerful. Acer Athlon Dual 1.8ghz, NVIDIA GeForce 7000m, 3Gb. I've installed the recommended NIVIDIA drivers and gone through all of the shell extensions, turning them on and off to try and get an improvement but it is still achingly slow.

I've rolled back to Gnome Classic and all is good. This just seems to me that it is all a bit untested but it could be some kind of simple conlfict with this machine as earlier on the Dell things were great. Hoping for a fix soon as I love the new look

This is your home PC? While memory is good, the processor isn't fast. It is noted that GNOME 3 + Shell extensions isn't fully giving the user experience the developers are aiming for, hence a new development is available from the Linux Mint developers called Cinnamon. This is a fork (copy) of the GNOME 3 code, with the MGSE built right in to it, for a better experience. You can already install this, might be worth a try

Yes this is a home machine which I use for a bit of light browsing, My main machine runs a Windows7 / Ubuntu 11.10 / Fedora 16 KDE triple boot. I use Fedora for heavy vfx work so I think I'll stay away from Gnome 3 for now...

After having more of a play I've found changing to the default them rather than Dark speeds things up but it's still not ideal.

Thanks for the link I'll download it now. Is there any reason why Cinnamon does not currently ship with Mint if it is an improvement on Gnome 3? Too early in beta possibly?

I have had the same thing happen (sort of). In virtual box this happened out of the blue. MGSE (with 3d acceleration, etc) was fairly fast, and then it slowed down one day. Just gnome-shell/MGSE, not gnome classic or MATE. I have no idea why - IIRC I didn't install anything (besides updates maybe?). I decided to reinstall, but it didn't help. It was still slow even with just the default installed. The only difference was that the first install was from the RC. I have had the same thing happen on real hardware, too. I didn't have as much of a slowdown, but it was noticeably slower. And I have a 2.3 GHz Core 2 Quad processor, 8 GB of RAM, and an nvidia geforce gt120 graphics card (I had the proprietary drivers installed). I wouldn't say that it was horribly slow, but I don't think that it should have been slow at all.

@christoph23 Cinnamon doesn't currently ship with Mint because it didn't exist when Mint 12 was released and it is still only an alpha.

Edit: Although cinnamon is in alpha, that is more feature wise. I have used it fairly extensively and I have found almost no bugs (a lot less than MGSE). I also find it faster.

Okay, select MATE from the gearwheel icon at the login screen Though the GNOME developers have stopped developing or supporting GNOME 2, MATE is the fork of GNOME 2 that will continue to be developed and supported. For everybody enjoying GNOME 2, MATE is included by default on Linux Mint

Cinnamon being slow is not due to Python if you have a quad-core processor. It is more likely a problem with proprietary graphics card driver. Linux Mint 13 will have Cinnamon, and MATE, by default and will have a new back-end that should improve Cinnamon usability when your graphics card driver isn't so good.